“I’m going to have a birthday party the first week in July, and I’m going to invite you, if your aunts will let you come. I’m not going to have Ilse Burnley though.”
“Don’t you like her?”
“No. She’s an awful tomboy. And then her father is an infidel. And so’s she. She always spells ‘God’ with a little ‘g’ in her dictation. Miss Brownell scolds her for it but she does it right along. Miss Brownell won’t whip her because she’s setting her cap for Dr. Burnley. But Ma says she won’t get him because he hates women. I don’t think it’s proper to ’sociate with such people. Ilse is an awful wild queer girl and has an awful temper. So has her father. She doesn’t chum with anybody. Isn’t it ridic’lus the way she wears her hair? You ought to have a bang, Emily. They’re all the rage and you’d look well with one because you’ve such a high forehead. It would make a real beauty of you. My, but you have lovely hair, and your hands are just lovely. All the Murrays have pretty hands. And you have the sweetest eyes, Emily.”
Emily had never received so many compliments in her life. Rhoda laid flattery on with a trowel. Her head was quite turned and she went home from school determined to ask Aunt Elizabeth to cut her hair in a bang. If it would make a beauty of her it must be compassed somehow. And she would also ask Aunt Elizabeth if she might wear her Venetian beads to school next day.
“The other girls may respect me more then,” she thought.
She was alone from the crossroads, where she had parted company with Rhoda, and she reviewed the events of the day with a feeling that, after all, she had kept the Starr flag flying, except for a temporary reverse in the matter of the snake. School was very different from what she had expected it to be, but that was the way in life, she had heard Ellen Greene say, and you just had to make the best of it. Rhoda was a darling; and there
